At the helm of the new fund, Kimmel joins a small group of solo female general partners. Dream Machine’s Alexia Bonatsos is targeting $25 million for her first fund. Day One Ventures’ Masha Drokova raised an undisclosed amount for her debut effort last year. Sarah Cone launched Social Impact Capital, a fund specializing in impact investing, in 2016, among others.

Meanwhile, venture capital fundraising is poised to reach all-time highs in 2019. In the first half of the year, a total of $20.6 billion in new capital was introduced to the startup market across more than 100 funds.

For most, the process of raising a successful venture fund can be daunting and difficult. For well-connected and established investors in the Bay Area, like Kimmel, raising a fund can be relatively seamless. Given the speed and ease of fund one in Kimmel’s case, she plans to raise her second fund with a $25 million target in as little as 12 months.

“The desire for the fund is to take a step back and imagine how do we build great consumer experiences in the workplace,” Kimmel tells gpgmail.

Kimmel has been an active angel investor for years, sourcing top enterprise deals via SaaS School, an invite-only workshop she created to educate early-stage SaaS founders on SaaS growth, monetization, sales and customer success. Prior to launching SaaS School, which will continue to run twice a year, Kimmel led go-to-market strategy at Zendesk, where she built the Zendesk for Startups program.

“You start by advising, then you start with very small angel checks,” Kimmel explains. “I reached this inflection point and it felt like a great moment to raise my own fund. I had friends like Ryan Hoover, who started Weekend Fund focused on consumer, and Alexia is one of my friends as well and I saw what she was doing with Dream Machine, which is also consumer. It felt like it was the right time to come out with a SaaS-focused fund.”

Emerging from stealth today, Work Life Ventures will invest up to $150,000 per company. To date, Kimmel has backed three companies with capital from the fund: Tandem, Dover and Command E. The first, Tandem, was amongst the most coveted deals in Y Combinator’s latest batch of companies. The startup graduated from the accelerator with millions from Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation north of $30 million.

Dover, another recent YC alum, provides recruitment software and is said to be backed by Founders Fund in addition to Work Life. Command E, currently in beta, is a tool that facilities search across multiple desktop applications. Kimmel is also an angel investor in Webflow, Girlboss, gpgmail Disrupt 2018 Startup Battlefield winner Forethought, Voyage and others.

Work Life is betting on the consumerization of the enterprise, or the idea that the next best companies for modern workers will be consumer-friendly tools. In her pitch deck to LPs, she cites the success of Superhuman and Notion, a well-designed email tool and a note-taking app, respectively, as examples of the heightened demand for digestible, easy-to-use B2B products.

“The next generation of applications for the workplace sees people spinning out of Uber, Coinbase and Airbnb,” Kimmel said. “They’ve faced these challenges inside their highly efficient tech company so we are seeing more consumer product builders deeply passionate about the enterprise space.”

But Kimmel doesn’t want to bury her thesis in jargon, she says, so you won’t find any B2B lingo on Work Life’s website or Instagram.

She’s focusing her efforts on a more important issue often vacant from conversations surrounding investment in the future of work: diversity & inclusion.

Kimmel meets with every new female hire of her portfolio companies. Though it’s “increasingly non-scalable,” she admits, it’s part of a greater effort to ensure her companies are thoughtful about D&I from the beginning: “Because I have a very focused fund, it’s about maintaining this community and ensuring that people feel like their voices are heard,” she said.

“I want to be mindful that I am a female GP and I feel honored to have that title.”

Brave Care, the YC-backed urgent care clinic for kids, has today announced the close of a $5 million seed round of funding.

The company recently graduated out of the last batch of Y Combinator companies but sat out of demo day because the this round was already oversubscribed, according to cofounder Darius Monsef .

Investors that participated in the round include Sesame Street (via their partnership with VC Collaborative Fund), Greycroft, Refactor, and Fifty Years.

Portland-based Brave Care launched in July with the goal of creating a pediatric-focused urgent care clinic that could both serve companies and save them from spending thousands of dollars on visits to the emergency room.

In 2015, there were approximately 30 million pediatric emergency room visits in the United States — 96.7% of them were treat-and-release visits.

Brave Care wants to be there for parents and kids when the situation calls for something in between their regular doctor and the emergency room.

The facility was built specifically for children. The waiting rooms are kid-friendly, the instruments in the patient rooms are kid-sized, and the general philosophy behind Brave focuses on taking extra time to clarify the diagnosis and the treatment options clearly and patiently to parents.

The company also has plans to introduce a triage tool that walks parents through symptoms and helps them decide if they should head to an urgent care clinic or straight to the Emergency Room.

The funding will allow Brave to build out a new electronic health records system that would streamline check-in, communication with parents during and after a visit, and help physicians and nurses spend more time focused on the patient and less time typing out notes on their computers.

Moreover, Brave will use the funding to open up new, more lightweight facilities in the Portland area that can act as spokes to the main hub facility, where the company has expensive but not oft-used equipment like an X-ray machine or a full-service lab.

Flat has raised one of Mexico’s largest pre-seed rounds to take the Opendoor real estate marketplace model across the Rio Grande.

The company snagged a $4.5 million pre-seed round to expand its business helping homeowners quickly sell their properties in Mexico. The round was led by ALLVP, an active early stage fund in Mexico. California-based Liquid 2 Ventures (for which Hall of Fame Quarterback Joe Montana is a GP), NextBillion and a few angels supported the round as well.

At the time of writing, Flat’s raise is the largest pre-seed funding round for a Mexican startup aside from the scooter company Grin, which was backed by Y Combinator and later went on to raise a $45M Series A and consolidate with Brazil’s bike sharing startup, Yellow.

While this ‘i-buying’ business model was initially pioneered by Opendoor in the US, the same need to efficiently sell property exists for consumers in other growing markets around the world. That’s why co-founders Victor Noguera and Bernardo Cordero founded Flat.

Bucking a trend that has seen many new Latin American founders hailing from Stanford University, Cordero and Noguera met at the University of California, Berkeley — just across the Bay.

The founders estimate the total value of the 40M homes in Mexico to be a $1.6 trillion total addressable market. They equate the value of homes sold per year to $25 billion. Let’s not forget the elephant in the room – SoftBank is undoubtedly eyeing Mexico with its $5 billion LatAm commitment.

Flat says it’s solving a few problems in the local home-buying market in Mexico. Firstly, anyone interested in selling their property lacks information about how much there home is actually worth. In the U.S., sellers can reference Zillow – but no such centralized database of real estate pricing information for the market of Mexico exists.

Then there’s the operational piece of transferring ownership of the property, which Flat says can take up to eight months and a notarized process – making the overall experience incredibly illiquid.

Flat’s actual product is a marketplace focused on helping the seller sell quickly. Flat visits your home, takes measurements, documents how many bath and bedrooms exist in the property, and determines how much your home is worth. From there, they manage renovations and transfer ownership of the property. The seller is paid within 72 hours.

International expansion has been difficult for many startups operating in Latin America as every country has its own regulatory barriers. That’s why when it comes to growth, Flat says it’s more focused on growing out their product within other verticals of property management to only serve a Mexican market, rather than expand to other Spanish-language countries in the LatAm region.

Let’s Do This is a Y Combinator alumni startup from 2018 which is a marketplace for endurance events, from a 5K fun run to an Ironman triathlon. It has now raised a $5 million seed round, with Serena Williams and Usain Bolt participating. The round was led by Pete Flint (partner at NFX, formerly of Trulia and LastMinute).

The platform lists 30,000 races of all distances and disciplines and claims to be the largest marketplace for endurance events in the world, offering key information about the races and exclusive booking perks for members, such as free cancellation protection.

They have recently agreed to a partnership with Hearst to power all race listings across Runner’s World, Men’s Health and Women’s Health in the U.S. and the U.K.

Serena Williams, the 22-time Grand Slam Champion, said in a statement: “I’ve seen first-hand the incredible impact these events can have on making people fitter, healthier and happier. I love that Let’s Do This is not only making events like these more accessible but also helping to support athletes of all different fitness levels. Women are especially less likely to participate in marathons and obstacle races, so it’s really important there’s a platform encouraging people to step out of their comfort zones and make a positive difference in their lives.”

In a statement Flint said: “This is a $30bn global market with enormous growth potential and already 100 million people crossing a finish line in the US each year. In just 18 months they’ve gone from launch to building the world’s best online marketplace to find, learn about, and book your next race. With over 30,000 events across the US, UK, and Australasia, this team is just getting started.”

Usain Bolt, world-record holder in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m, said: “Throughout my career I’ve been lucky enough to inspire people to follow their dreams, get off the couch and get exercising. That’s what attracted me to Let’s Do This. It’s a company that is totally committed to changing the world and inspiring more people to get out there. Like me, their team doesn’t believe in limits and is totally committed to being the best in the world. It’s a really natural fit with what I care about and what I believe in so I am very happy to be supporting their mission to inspire more people to have epic experiences.”

The company was founded by childhood friends Alex Rose and Sam Browne, who got into the space at university. Their team consists of people from Facebook, Google, Oracle, Deliveroo and SkyScanner.

Top Articles in August

We are back from Labor Day (which an ironically somewhat unkind Canadian EC subscriber noted also takes place up north). August was the most successful month for Extra Crunch since our launch about six months ago — so thank you to the thousands of new and continuing members that help us sustain quality journalism and analysis.

For those who took extended vacations last month, here are the top five most popular articles among EC members we published last month:

Y Combinator Demo Day: We picked our favorites from day one and day two and our venture capital reporter Kate Clark wrote an analysis of what the 160+ startups in the batch seemed to indicate about YC’s investment theses these days. YC remains as popular as ever if EC members’ curiosity with these articles is any indication.

How a Swedish saxophonist built Kobalt, the world’s next music unicorn: Our Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham traveled to Europe to report out this deep dive into Kobalt, which is upending traditional music rights management, and is closing in on unicorn status as well. This origin story here was one of my favorites, since it showed how tenacity against incredible adversity can lead to success in the long run. I am editing Eric’s next two parts of this EC-1 as I write this, so expect those shortly.

How Dropbox, Nike, Salesforce, MailChimp, Google and Pepsi welcome their new hires: This was a bit of a surprise one for me. Our guest writer Vladimir Polo has been collecting welcome kits from different companies for years, and he compiled all of them for this piece on how different companies think about welcoming employees.

WeWork’s S-1 misses these three key points: WeWork is the most polarizing startup I have seen in sometime. So I read through the S-1 (yes, all 200-300 pages of the damn thing) to find a couple of nuggets I thought the company was missing from the filing (which, in itself, was a follow up of my EC analysis of what we should expect to see in the S-1 in the first place).

How should B2B startups think about growth? Not like B2C: Finally, we had our guest writers Kevin Barry and Tyler Elliston discuss the differences between marketing and growing a B2B startup and how that compares with B2C startups. They give a detailed guide on the ways to think about growth in B2B and the tactical tools that these startups can use.

Apple still has work to do on privacy

Over the long weekend, our privacy and policy writer Natasha Lomas wrote an insightful analysis of what we know about Apple’s privacy promises given the news that the company was offering Siri recordings to contractors for grading. Lomas sees Apple’s privacy promises as quite cynical given the context, but also sees an opportunity for the company to right its past wrongs.

As cities in emerging markets grapple with increasingly traffic-clogged and dangerous streets, Urbvan, a startup providing private, high-end transportation shuttles in Mexico, has raised $9 million in a new round of financing.

Co-founded by Joao Matos Albino and Renato Picard, Urbvan is taking the reins from startups like the now-defunct Chariot and tailoring the business for the needs of emerging market ecosystems.

Hailing from Portugal, Albino arrived in Mexico City as a hire for the Rocket Internet startup Linio. Although Linio didn’t last, Albino stayed on in Mexico eventually landing a job working for the startup Mercadoni, which is where he met Picard.

The two men saw the initial success of Chariot as it launched from Y Combinator, but were also tracking companies like the Indian startup Shuttl.

“We wanted to make shared mobility more accessible and a little bit more efficient,” says Albino. “We studied the economics and we studied the market and we knew there was a huge urgency in the congested cities of Latin America.”

Unlike the U.S. — and especially major cities like San Francisco and New York — where public transportation is viewed as relatively safe and efficient, the urban environment of Mexico City is seen as not safe by the white collar workers that comprise Urbvan’s principle clientele.

The company started operating back in 2016. At the time it had five vans that it leased and retrofitted to include amenities like wi-fi and plenty of space for a limited number of passengers. Since those early days the company has expanded significantly. It now claims over 15,000 monthly users and a fleet of 180 vans.

Urbvan optimized for safety as well as comfort, according to Albino. The company has deals with WeWork, Walmart and other retailers in Mexico City so that all . of the stops on t he route are protected and safe. The company also vets its drivers and provides them with additional training because of the expanded capacity of the vans.

Each van is also equipped with a panic button and cameras inside and outside of the van for additional monitoring.

Customers either pay $3 per ticket or sign up for a monthly pass that ranges from $100 to $130.

Financing for the company came from Kaszek Ventures and Angel Ventures with previous investor Mountain Nazca also participating.

For Albino, who went to India to observe Shuttl’s operations, the global market for these kinds of services is so large that there will be many winners in each geography.

“Each city is different and you need to adapt. The technology needs to be adaptable to the city’s concerns . and where it can . add more value,” says Albino. “The Indian market is super different from Latin America.. It’s a huge market with a lot of congestion… But the value proposition is a bit more basic [for Shuttl].”

Urbvan is currently operating in Mexico City and Monterrey, but has plans to expand into Guadalajara later this year.

Software APIs help different tools communicate with one another, let developers access essential services without having to code it themselves and are critical components for driving a platform-driven strategy. Yet they require solid documentation to help make the best use of them. ReadMe, a startup that helps companies customize their API documentation, announced a $9 million Series A today led by Accel with help from Y Combinator. The company was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2015 cohort.

Prior to today’s funding announcement, the company had taken just a $1.2 million seed round in 2014. Today, it reports 3,000 paying customers and that it has been profitable for the last several years, an unusual position for a startup. In spite of this success, co-founder and CEO Gregory Koberger said as the company has taken on larger customers, they have more sophisticated requirements, and that prompted them to take this round of funding.

In addition, it has expanded the platform to use a company’s API logs to help create more dynamic documentation and improve customer support kinds of scenarios. But by taking on data from other companies, it needs to make sure the data is secure, and today’s funding will help in that regard.

“We’re going to still build the company traditionally by hiring more engineers, more support people, more designers, the obvious stuff, but the main impetus for doing this was that we started working with bigger companies with more secure data. So a lot of the money is going to help make sure that we handle that right,” Koberger explained.

Image: ReadMe

He says this ability to make use of the API logs has opened up all kinds of possibilities for the company, as the data provides a valuable window into how people use the APIs. “It’s amazing how much you get by just actually seeing what the server sees. When people are having problems with an API, they can debug it themselves because they can actually see the problems, the support team can see it as well,” Koberger said.

Accel’s Dan Levine, whose firm is leading the investment, believes that having good documentation is the difference between making and breaking an API. “APIs don’t just create technical integration, they create ecosystems around core services and underpin corporate partnerships that generate billions of dollars. ReadMe is as much a strategy as it is a service for businesses. Providing clean, interactive, data-driven API documentation to make developers love working with you can be the difference between 100 partnerships or 1,000 partnerships,” Levine said.

ReadMe was founded in 2014. It has 22 employees in their San Francisco office, a number that should increase with today’s funding.

About one-fourth of the startups in Y Combinator’s summer batch had a female founder. Not the most disappointing statistic if you consider this: Companies with at least one female founder have raised only about 11% of venture capital funding in the U.S. in 2019, according to PitchBook. Companies with female founders exclusively have raised just 3%.

There is so much room for improvement.

To close the funding gap, programs tailored to female entrepreneurs are working tirelessly to mentor and incubate upstarts in hopes of impressing venture capitalists. Ready, Set, Raise, an accelerator program built for women, by women, is amongst the new efforts to help female and non-binary founders raise more dollars, or, at the very least, build relationships with investors.

The accelerator program, created by the Seattle-based network of startup founders and investors called the Female Founders Alliance, is today announcing its second batch of companies, a group that includes a sextech business, an AI-powered tool for podcasters and a line of workwear created for women who work on farms, construction sites and factory floors.

Ready, Set, Raise has partnered with Microsoft for Startups to provide entrepreneurs $120,000 in Azure credits, as well as technical and business mentoring from executives of the Redmond-based software giant. Other new partners include Brex and Carta, two well-funded companies that plan to lend the support of their executives to teach entrepreneurs about startup finance, valuation and fundraising terms.

“Both FFA and Microsoft recognize a major lapse in opportunities given to women and non-binary founders,” writes Ian Bergman, a managing director of Microsoft for Startups, in a statement. “We look forward to our continued work together to promote this necessary shift in the VC landscape.”

FFA’s founder and chief executive officer Leslie Feinzaig, who launched the organization in 2017, has been an outspoken advocate of diversity in entrepreneurship and venture capital, and well as providing awareness and resources for founders who are also parents.

“My experience fundraising was undeniably shaped by the fact that I am a woman, and at the time was a new mom,” Feinzaig, who previously founded an edtech startup, told Seattle Business Magazine earlier this year. “A year later, I was about to give up. Instead, I started a Facebook group, including all of the founders and tech startup leaders I knew. It was the group that I needed, made up of people who knew exactly what I was going through. That’s how the Female Founders Alliance was born.”

FFA’s Ready, Set, Raise provides its companies childcare throughout the six-week program, in which companies work one-on-one with experienced coaches ahead of a demo day that will take place on October 16th.

Here’s a look at Ready, Set, Raise’s sophomore class of startups:

Echo Echo: AI-powered tools for podcasters.

Give InKind: Coordinates support through major life events.

Honistly: A provider of extended auto warranties to help with short-term cash needs.

Juicebox It: Modernizes erotica with a chatbot that is arousing and educational.

Building exteriors tend to get gross. Dirt clings to the walls. Windows get filmy. Spiderwebs amass. If you live in a particularly humid area, mold and mildew can start to make exterior walls look like a science experiment.

On taller buildings, scrubbing it all off generally means bringing a bucket truck, scaffolding, or suspension gear and having a crew hang from the side of the building. It’s a lot of prep work, with a lot of potential for falls and injuries. Lucid, a new company out of North Carolina, has a different approach: drones.

Rather than pressure washing, their drone “soft washes” the building — be it a house, an office, or the campus library — by spraying a cleaning solution that the company says is biodegradable and works on surfaces like brick and limestone. The operator rolls up to a site, unfolds the drone, powers it up, then plugs it into a tank sitting in the back of their work truck. A hose tether runs from the tank to the drone at all times, feeding the low-pressure sprayer while keeping the bulk of the weight down on the ground. The operator handles the drone via remote control.

The drone is currently battery-powered; in the future, Lucid plans to work tethered power into the design. The company tells me the drone is currently designed/tested to clean buildings up to 120 feet tall. That’s around 10-12 stories tall, depending on the building’s design.

While their early tests were done with off-the-shelf drones, Lucid tells me it’s now custom building its own; they need to be able to carry the weight of the tether, fly slowly for finer controls and easier operation, and stay light enough (under 55 lbs) that it fits within the FAA’s small unmanned aircraft guidelines. The company tells me that their drone weighs around 25-30lbs, depending on payload requirements.

Lucid co-founder Andrew Ashur says they originally set out to be the service provider, hiring operators and cleaning the buildings themselves. When they began testing the concept and other companies started reaching out, the team realized that they might be better off selling the drone itself. They’re now starting to rent the drones out to companies for $3,000 per month, which includes support, training, and maintenance (because, as any hobbyist drone pilot could tell you, things break.)

Lucid is part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch. As of YC Demo Day last week, the company noted that it had signed contracts worth around $33,000 per month in recurring revenue.

Ashur tells me that while they’re considering a nationwide rollout, their focus right now is on the Southeastern United States — it’s where they started, and where mold and mildew issues are common.

The Slovenian founders behind PredictLeads, another recent Y Combinator graduate, applied to the prestigious accelerator five times before they were admitted.

Their business, which helps venture capital firms and sales teams identify high growth companies, i.e. potential investments and potential customers, had come a long way since it was founded in 2016. And earlier this year — finally — YC gave them the green light to complete its three-month accelerator program.

“We almost ran out of money in 2017 and then I took a loan from my mother because that bank wouldn’t give me the loan at that point,” PredictLeads chief executive officer Roq Xever tells gpgmail. “But by then, the data was getting much better and we were able to make higher-value sells and that got us to profitability.”

You read that right. Unlike most of today’s tech startups, PredictLeads is profitable, though, only out of pure necessity: “We didn’t know we would ever get into YC to raise the money we needed, so we structured the company to make more money than we spent.”

Xever leads the small PredictLeads team alongside marketing chief Miha Stanovnik and chief technology officer Matic Perovsek. Xever tells gpgmail it wasn’t until they realized the opportunity to sell their product to VCs that YC became interested. Today, PredictLeads has eight venture firms as customers, the names of which they were not able to disclose.

The tool helps investors track companies they’ve considered in the past. PredictLeads notifies users if certain companies start getting traction so they can reevaluate the deal and helps investors become aware of startups they may not have otherwise heard of.

More and more venture capital firms are turning to third-party tools to help them make sense of and leverage data in the investment and company-tracking process, leading to the birth of new data-focused companies. Social Capital co-founder Chamath Palihapitiya is spinning out a company from his venture capital fund-turned-family-office, gpgmail learned earlier this year. The new entity, temporarily dubbed CaaS (short for capital-as-a-service) Technologies, will focus on providing data-driven insights to VC firms, for example.

Startups have also realized the importance of data. Narrator, another recent YC graduate, is betting big on this trend. The startup wants to become the operating system for data science by providing companies software that claims to fulfill the same service as a data team for the price of an analyst.

PredictLeads, for its part, collects data from websites, press releases, news articles, blogs and career sites, then uses supervised machine learning to extract and structure the data. The startup tracks 20 million public and private companies.

Now that it’s a graduate of YC, the team is in the process of moving its headquarters to the U.S. Either New York or San Francisco, says Xever, who’s currently navigating the difficult visa application process.

The startup is today raising a $1.5 million seed financing at a $10 million valuation. They plan to use the capital to expand their service to cater to quant funds, build a Salesforce app to better support sales teams, and, of course, expand their small team.